Contact centers play a significant role in customer satisfaction and experience. A lousy interaction leads to a drop off of customers your business is likely to have in the future. How can your business help to improve its contact center?
The Success Of Your Contact Center
To measure success and ultimately enhance the customer’s experience, here are six ways to set up a contact center for success.
Offer a Multi-Channel Experience
Allow customers to choose how they want to communicate with your contact center through a channel they feel the most comfortable with. For example, if a customer enjoys speaking with someone over the phone, they should be able to, or perhaps a customer prefers text or chat, they should be able to do that too.
Train Your Agents
When a customer calls for help the last thing they should think about is how obvious it sounds that your agent is reading a script. It comes across as impersonal. Agents follow a standard set of guidelines on a call, so they don’t sound like a robot. Every customer is different. Train your agents to interpret your customer’s mood and adapt accordingly to increase the chance of the customer coming back.
It’s no coincidence that this one has to start us off. After all, your contact center agent is representing your company and your brand. Poor customer service, on the part of your agent, will send customers right to your competitors. A recent study showed that 65% of customers would take their business elsewhere because of poor customer service. Train your agents to keep The Golden Rule in mind when they are on a call.
A little impact can go a long way. Profitability can increase as much as 125% if your customer defection rate is reduced by even 5%.
Deal with High Attrition
The average contact center will see an annual turnover rate of 33%. Considering the cost of the hiring process, training, and overtime for those agents that are left; this can hurt a contact center’s bottom line. To deal with this problem, it’s essential that to focus on the hiring process.
When a qualified employee comes in, train them with recordings of actual scenarios. Allow them to come up with the best way to handle a problem situation. “Outside the box thinking” could be the answer your business needs. Recognize and reward your agents for their achievements.
It’s also essential to use analytics to determine how well your agents are doing. Call analytics are used to determine how well your agents are doing. Agents that are experiencing a decline in performance can have their skills sharpened with refresher training. Those that are doing well should be recognized and rewarded for their achievements. When high performance is rewarded, this boosts morale.
Identify & Prioritize Incoming Calls
Customers don’t like to be kept waiting. They’re likely frustrated in the first place, and now they have to wait to get help. In fact, 69% of customers said they were on hold for too long when contacting a contact center. Let customers know how long the average wait time is, and provide the option for them to receive a call if it’s too long.
An IVR can be customized to detect a past caller automatically. Allowing for a customer to navigate the system, and state their issue will enable it to be appropriately prioritized. Have they called before with an urgent problem? This information can be sent to one of your best agents ahead of time. This allows them to know how to serve a customer’s needs best. Recall the customer history, greet them by names, and create an overall personable experience.
Stay Up To Date On Technology
When it comes to choosing a contact center to help your customers, a cloud-based solution helps your business do more for less. Cloud-based contact centers are hosted online and can be accessed via the internet. This allows for a minimal amount of hardware to adequately run a contact center. Furthermore, cloud-based contact centers allow for a more significant amount of uptime.
A study by DMG Consulting found that more than 62% of organizations use some form of cloud solutions for their contact centers. Among the companies that currently don’t, 42% of those are considering moving to the cloud soon.
Focus On Quality
When contact center employees are overworked, it leads to a reduction in quality with regards to customer service. Let your employees recharge their batteries. It’s important to show employees that your business does care for them.
However, customers still need to have their needs addressed. That’s why a cloud-based contact center is a smart solution for your business. This allows home, or remote offices, to be placed into a centralized schedule that can be remotely administered.
Think you got it?
IVR Technology Group is a leader in secure voice and text applications. We also believe in help companies improve customer experiences and delightful user interactions. That’s why we became a Certified Solutions Partner with Blueworx. This allows us help companies delivering user experience design services, integrated with the power of IBM Watson, into contact centers.